Friday, March 20, 2015

Extirpating systemd from Debian

I found out that all my debian machines switched to systemd without my consent, with just a standard apt-get ugrading.
I despise that decision.

I did not follow the latest discussion about it, I was left with the impression that it would have been installed only if needed, but evidently I was wrong.

Can you get back? Time to toss Debian? I hoped not, I know of other fellow developers who switched distribution, but Debian is Debian.

Remove systemd and sysvinit (which is now a transitional package) and put back sysvinit-core back. I had the fear that I bricked my laptops, but it still works. For how long? I don't know.

I'm very very sad about this. If I think of GNU/Linux I think of Debian, it has been with me since 68k times, when potato was cool. Debian made a very bad decision.

Something newer than ol' sysvinit? Something modern, fast, capable of parallelism. Yes.
But something portable, light, secure, which is not a dependency hell, which does one thing. In other words, something in line with the Unix philosophy.

Not the enormous pile of rotting shit which is systemd. When I removed it, I freed almost 13Mbytes from my system. I am relieved, but it shows also how big that pile of crap is.

So, for now, Debian can stay with me, I hope it will be for a long while. Long enough that debian will revert or systemd will go away.

4 comments:

Our work on extirpating systemd from Debian is going pretty well, but it shows to be definitely a bigger task than just uninstalling a few packages. Unfortunately the fork is really necessary to preserve init freedom :^(

Interesting Jaromil. For now my extirpated Debian works for me and nothing has tried to install it, but Devuan is perhaps needed. Systemd needs to be extirpated!Debian supports many platforms, like ppc. I'll check Devuan!

Mike, thanks for reading.I'd be perhaps more neutral if it wasn't "pushed" on me and if it was more portable.I use GNU on Linux an HURD, however, I am also a big BSD fan. Also, generally, I am interested that the software I use is as portable as possible: that is Freedom